Ccc ya 13
- 1. 1.In which ways does your media product use, develop or challenge forms and conventions of real media products?
- 2. When I listened to the music track and very much thought of the lyric and images that went along with the lyrics. These lyrics listed are very easy to picture. ‘Great clouds roll over the hills’, you can imagine clouds rolling over the hills. ‘But if you close your eyes’, I think of a man walking around with his eyes shut. ‘In the city that we love’ I picture a guy walking around his city with his arms out looking happy and smiley.
- 3. We felt that many current music videos are very colourful, focusing on a variety of costumes and locations. We gave thought to these conventions of the genre when choosing our locations. The graffiti wall was selected in part to tie in with the lyrics as well as to reflect the urban feel we wanted to represent. The bright, vibrant colours also reflected the mood or the artist/song. This fits in with Barthes ideas of images reinforcing cultural myths - in this case the images we used in our video were meant to reinforce the cultural myth of vibrant, urban youth, enjoying life, exploring the city (hence the multiple locations used in the pop promo). Richard Dyer did a lot of work on the ‘pop star’ as a construct. This idea also influenced our work as our singer was very much constructed to fit the image we desired. We wanted an artist that seemed to be in it for his love of the music, rather than ‘the bling’. This was reflected through his costumes; the first was the more urban, made up of a plain purple hoodie and jeans - no logos, no jewellery, no grillz, no big watch, his second costume was a dark grey suit, showing that he can dress to impress, without needing to accessorise. We specifically chose a guy whose appearance wouldn’t distract from the music, going against Dyer’s idea that the star dominates the narrative more than the lyrics.
- 4. Another of Barthes theories that we made use of is that of Semiotics. In one way, the graffiti wall that our artist sings in front of is just a wall (the sign) but it also signifies, as the lyrics suggest, the potential for disaster (“and the walls keep tumbling down”). EA Kaplan believes that a frequent return to the singer’s face in a pop video is a key anchoring technique, keeping the audience grounded in what they are experiencing. In our video we utilised this idea through the editing of a variety of medium close-ups. Our singer appears continuously in the video and this links to our idea of it being ‘all about the music’ and gimmick-free. The original singer of this song was also the song’s writer and it was important to us to recreate the same closeness between the artist and the song with our artist.
- 5. We specifically set out to make a video that would appeal to both genders. It feels like the majority of pop videos out there today are highly sexualised, glorifying (or even exploiting) the female form. This was not our intention. We purposefully went against Laura Mulvey’s theories of scopophilia, where films create images of women for the gratification of men, but did not want to fall into the trap of sexualising our artist either. We felt it was important to go against the norms of the genre and produce a ‘PG’ video that could be enjoyed by both men and women and boys and girls - people that can look up to Bastille and see him as a role model in an industry that is lacking in them. This was part of our ‘preferred reading’ of the media text (Stuart Hall) and we feel from our post production audience research that this was successful. Andrew Goodwin pinpoints various elements that he believes are typical to a music video. We did foreground the singer’s face as, as previously mentioned, we wanted to emphasise his relationship with the song. We also used the lyrics as visual clues, reflected in some of the video imagery, such as the graffiti covered walls. We also used some quick cuts giving a montage effect, as inspired by the Russian film maker Sergei Eisenstein.